Since 2006, the Riggio Honors Program has been a vital part of the School of Writing at The New School, benefitting over 2000 students, and funding over 150. Reviving The New School's American Vanguard publishing imprint, we've undertaken—students and faculty—this Digital Documentary of the Riggio program. We've gathered creative work from faculty and students, highlighted programming, explored the history of The 12th Street Journal, and offered reflections on the Riggio experience.

Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland were trailblazers of fashion, Feminism, sexuality, and the editorial process in the early 20th century. Together they would carve out haute couture lifestyles that would serve as placeholders for affluent queer socialites during the latter part of the same century. In All We Know: Three Lives, Lisa Cohen explores these women in their burgeoning era through distinct narratives that intersect circumstance and their impact on the aesthetic world. In Ms. Cohen’s Riggio Forum, she reads through several of the book’s passages.  Later... Read The Rest →

The New School event titled “Writing What You Don’t Know” featured poet Laren McClung and novelist Kiran Desai for a reading from their respective works and a discussion on the process of writing on an unfamiliar subject. Laren McClung read from her collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain, based on her father’s experience in the Vietnam War. Kiran Desai read from her novel, The Inheritance of Loss, a story centered around an undocumented Indian immigrant in the United States and the ramifications of colonialism and the post-colonial status... Read The Rest →

The two authors slated to read sat in the empty front row of what was otherwise a packed lecture room at The New School University. Tiphanie Yanique, the evening’s curator, introduced Victoria Brown and Amber Dermont. The theme of the event: “Write What You Know.” The reading, followed by a Q&A session, was intended to provide insight into the process of writing fiction drawn from personal experience; and, as Yanique explained, no two writers other than Brown and Dermont were better equipped to speak that evening. Victoria Brown described her... Read The Rest →

Marco Roth spilled all in the February Riggio Forum for his book, The Scientists: A Family Romance. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) He spoke candidly about inspirations, hesitations, and the family drama surrounding his debut memoir. During the mid-80s, when Roth was about 13 years old, his father confessed that he was diagnosed as HIV- positive. Roth’s father ran a clinic at Mount Sinai for sickle-cell anemia, and as the story went, he was accidentally infected with a needle while at work. In the early 90s Roth’s aunt, Anne Roiphe,... Read The Rest →

Teetering on my lap is a staggering 600-pag book, titled Letters of William Gaddis and published by the literary journal Conjunctions and Dakley Press. The book chronicles 70 some years of letters written by author William Gaddis. The letters reveal introspections, conversations, disillusionment, complications of work and family, experiences of revolution, and the forging of seminal works of literature by America’s postmodern literary darling, described by the New York Times Book Review as, “a presiding genius . . . of post war fiction.” Bradford Morrow, founder of the literary journal... Read The Rest →